I will get to the group One Self in a moment, but first let's focus on the history and development of its most prominent member, DJ Vadim.

The birth of triphop in the '90s brought with it the birth of abstract hiphop. What separated abstract hiphop from hiphop proper is also what, in the '70s, separated dub from reggae: both experimented with and isolated (abstracted) the form of a song. A song being made of two parts: singing (content) and the music (the form). In abstract hiphop, the rapper either had no role or a secondary one to the beats—how they are spaced, manipulated, and programmed. The absence of the rapper in abstract hiphop drew its first criticism: that it removed the soul of hiphop, the rapper (the voice, the real, the politics), and made it all heady (intellectual, cold, apolitical). But abstract hiphop, as a project, went on to produce some of the most impressive artist achievements in all of hiphop. One such achievement was U.S.S.R. Repertoire by DJ Vadim.

Born in Russia and raised in the UK, DJ Vadim came to fame in the dead middle of the '90s. He—along with DJ Krush (Japan), DJ Shadow (USA), and DJ Cam (France)—launched the "abstract era," the epoch of hiphop's self-reflection. Though all four DJs occasionally used rappers and singers on their tracks, these guest appearances were more about ornamentation than "the message." The reason why one bought their albums was to hear new musical concepts, processed samples, difficult scratch effects, complex sonic structures, and explorations. The meaning or substance of DJ Krush's Strictly Turntablized (1994) was an academic approach to the art of beat building; for DJ Cam's Mad Blunted Jazz (1996), it was an aesthetic breakdown of beats and jazz samples; and DJ Vadim's U.S.S.R. Repertoire (A Theory of Verticality) (1996) was an ontological inquiry of "that old boom bap." Indeed, Vadim had the ability to make some of his beats sound as if they were asking philosophical questions: What is life? Is there a God? Is the universe empty?

During the second half of the '90s, DJ Vadim ran a record label, Jazz Fudge, that released some of the coldest, most intellectual, and yet ghostly hiphop in the world. He worked with rapper/journalist Acyde, who is now a member of the thriving Blacktronica movement in London. He also worked with Lewis Parker, whose Masquerades & Silhouettes (1998) is one of the most underrated rap albums of the '90s. As Little Aida, Vadim released Confessions, a dark, moody, and mysterious collection of triphop songs that surpassed even the best of Portishead and Tricky.

Finally we get to One Self, DJ Vadim's most successful project outside of the '90s. One Self has three principal members—two rappers and a producer. One rapper, Blu Rum, is male, from the U.S., and has a style that is poetic and involved; the other rapper, Yarah Bravo, is a half-Chilean/half-Brazilian woman who was brought up in Sweden and has a style that recalls Ladybug from Digable Planets. Though collaborative in spirit, One Self's music, particularly on their 2005 album Children of Possibility, owes much to the aesthetic experiments DJ Vadim conducted and developed in the '90s.

The beats are minimal and widely spaced, the samples are strange and spacey, and on some tracks one hears that ghostly, eerie squeaking of doors, rusty garden gates, and hinges of old cabinets that appeared and vanished on much of Vadim's early work. But the striking difference between Vadim's new work and his earlier abstractions is that One Self are actually hiphop. The music is there not for itself but for the rappers, for their message. One Self are political and about distributing positive messages to the masses; it is rap that wants to make the world a better place. One Self offer us a utopian vision. And because they have this purpose, Vadim's music feels warmer, more optimistic, and even more feminine. His work in the '90s was dark, cold, and often about death—facing nothingness, dealing with absence, trying to find meaning in a world that seemed meaningless. Vadim was then hiphop's Dostoyevsky; now he is hiphop's Tolstoy.

One track in his early period was called "Impossible" (1998)—meaning no chance, nothing good can ever happen, there is no hope: It is "impossible, impossible, impossible." As the title of One Self's album makes clear, Vadim's new music is about "possibility."